


The Scent of Rain

by Orockthro



Series: Lipstick and Vodka (The Leona Universe) [2]
Category: The Man From U.N.C.L.E.
Genre: Alt!Gender AU, Alternate Universe - Always a Different Sex, Always-A-Woman!NapoleonSolo, M/M, Non-Sexual relationships, Other, Queerplatonic Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-03
Updated: 2015-01-03
Packaged: 2018-03-05 04:46:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,405
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3106550
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Orockthro/pseuds/Orockthro
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>His name was Fyodor. He wasn’t a particularly beautiful man, not by any of the standards Illya has come to use. Dark hair cut a little too short, eyes a little too shadowed. But he spoke Russian with a Muscovite accent, and he smelled like rain.</p><p>(Or, Illya has a run in with romance, and Solo picks up the pieces.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Scent of Rain

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mayamaia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mayamaia/gifts).



> A little bonus new years cheer for Mayamaia, who asked for "...something Leona and Illya - maybe a snuggle conversation after Illya has had a near brush with romance somewhere or other?"
> 
> This takes place in the gender!AU universe where Napoleon Solo is (and always has been) a woman. This fic is not plot related to the previous story in this universe, but reading the other first might still help understand their dynamics.

His name was Fyodor. He wasn’t a particularly beautiful man, not by any of the standards Illya has come to use. Dark hair cut a little too short, eyes a little too shadowed. But he spoke Russian with a Muscovite accent, and he smelled like rain.

He drinks his American coffee poured by an American attendant, and listens to the rattle-rattle-rattah of the train as it ambles from Rochester to New York. The final portion of his trip home, it feels the longest.

Solo meets him at Penn Station with a large umbrella in her hands. The rain smells wrong here, somehow. Too urban, and yet not enough. Ozone covered up by car exhaust.

“How was it?” she asks, and she swings the umbrella up to cover them both.

“Child’s play,” he says, and tries to affect his usual airs. He reaches into his overcoat and pulls out a thin envelope, which he hands over without any spectacle. “There were no issues with the retrieval.” There were other issues, though. They will not make it into his report.

It was a solo mission, sans Solo, and a long one by their standards. Eleven days in the moderate isolation of a chemistry lab, trying to ferret out where leaked information was coming from, is exactly enough time to fall - just a little bit - in love. It is something he tries rigorously to avoid, love. But it creeps in anyhow, uninvited, and drains him empty.

“Night cap?” Solo says, squinting at him from under the black umbrella.

He hadn’t realized it was so late. It’s pushing midnight and the city is starting its shift from reputable to less so in that slow creep of neon. He nods and they slip into a taxi.

Illya expects them to wind up at his apartment. They so often do, and it’s been nearly two weeks since he’s been home. He yearns for his own bed, his own chair to sink down into, his threadbare set of lounge clothes. He long ago gave up questioning Leona’s wish to keep her home life and UNCLE as separate as possible; it seemed only fair to give her that. But she calmly, teasingly, gives her address to the driver, and the taxi pulls up to her Midtown apartment.

They walk in silence until they reach the elevator. The doors slide shut, and the outside world is once more at bay.

“The last time you brought me here was nearly six months ago. I was possibly concussed.”

“There was no ‘possibly’ about it, Kuryakin. You didn’t know up from down.”

The elevator shuffles upwards, slow and steady. Up to Leona’s beduaire, up away from the smell of rain and his mother tongue, and Illya’s not sure he ever learned up from down to begin with. He’s not sure of it now, as he floats behind her out of the elevator, untethered and unmoored, as the clock strikes midnight and one day flows into the next without any hesitation.

She ushers him in with the same flair she’d give to a lover, and he rolls his eyes as she shakes water droplets off the umbrella like a dog. “Showoff. Do you even have vodka here? I don’t want any of that swill you call wine.” He wants a drink, wants the cool burn of something untestable to slide down his throat and cover up the cool burn of everything else.

She quirks her head in false scandalment. “Would I ever leave you in need?” Her face shutters off as soon as the words leave her mouth, like she knows it was an unfair thing to have asked.  She only turned the side lamp on, and it gives her apartment a honey glow that’s jarringly different from the world they’ve shuttered themselves off from. The light casts shadows against the wall, creating unfamiliar shapes. The bedroom door is cracked open, and the shadows spill into the vacuumous space.

“Or,” she says, following his gaze, “we could save the drinks for another night.”

Illya sighs, deep and tired. He blinks, and in that moment all he can smell is the not-quite-right rain still dripping of Leona’s umbrella, perched next to the door. But it isn’t Fyodor staring at him when he opens his eyes, it’s Leona. Something buried deep inside him unclenches.

“If you insist,” he says, and she seems to take it for what it is: a plea.

Solo pulls off her wool overcoat. He thinks it may have been a gift from Angelique - red was always her color. He follows her, half in a post-mission fugue that’s almost inexcusable, if he weren’t for the relative safety of Solo’s home.

He sheds his own coat as he walks, leaving it draped across the back of one of her dining room chairs, and it casts a ghostly shadow across the room. His shoes he drops at the threshold of the bedroom, and his shirt is shrugged off by the time they reach the bed.

She keeps the lights off as they get comfortable. His body, as well as his mind, is exhausted from days working in the lab, nights breaking into the lab, and even later nights sneaking into Fyodor’s room. He looks around once he’s settled, but he doesn’t remember the details of the room from his last time here. His bloodstream was predominantly morphine at the time, and the room a haze of half lucid dreams and not much else. Now his mind fills the deep shadows with half truths and extrapolations instead. There is a dark spot on Leona’s dresser that could be a picture frame. The dead lover she rarely speaks of, perhaps? Or maybe a more contemporary wound. Or perhaps he is projecting, and unlike himself, Leona is not wounded at all, and there is nothing to hide.

“You’re quiet,” she says. Then she pauses. “More than usual, I mean.”

When they curl together in his own apartment there is always light of some sort or another. His blinds are too thin, and the life of the city leeches in, uninvited, through the cracks. Here it is nearly pitch, and there is only each other. Even in unfamiliar dark, he still knows exactly where to find her hand under the covers.

“How do you always know?” He can’t quite say, ‘When I needed you,’ or, ‘When I hurt.’ She follows the topic shift anyhow. She knows him too well. His hand finds hers, but her fingers are the ones to twine around his own and claim him as hers.

“You’re not quite the Russian front you believe yourself to be, my friend.” They shimmy and under the expensive sheets until she is wrapped around him like a vine. “Did he hurt you?” she asks, soft.

He leans into her grasp and thinks about that Muscovite voice, about those dark eyes that were nothing but kind and accommodating. “No,” he says to the dark spot on her dresser. His eyes are adjusting to the dim now. He can make out a black and white silhouette. A woman’s silhouette. “I rather think I hurt him, though.”

Her arms tighten around him, suffocating and comforting. She understands, perhaps more than anyone. Her chin presses sharp against his shoulder, just on the right side of pain.

“It was for the best,” he says, more to himself than Leona, now. Perhaps more to the picture frame. He can feel himself being lulled into sleep: the long mission, the emotional drain, and the late hour are all catching up with him at once. There’s a certain honesty in late night confessions. And a certain lie. The ghostly image is staring back at him now. He wonders if Leona has noticed his preoccupation with her secrets, her wounds, but of course she has. She brought him here, after all.

“The KGB were watching him. I was protected, but he was not.” It’s nice, with Leona. He knows he doesn’t have to explain any more than that. She understands.

They’re quiet for awhile, both on the edge of sleep  but too wound up to succumb. Until, finally, Leona says, “Sometimes we have to hurt the ones we love before someone else hurts them worse.” She holds him too tightly, but he doesn’t pull away. He sinks into the claustrophobia of it, of her holding him in check.

He falls asleep still held in her viper grasp, and he dreams of rain.

 

 


End file.
